Dr Herman Els

Dr Herman Els is the Executive Chairman of the National Hunting and Shooting Association (Natshoot [NHSA]).

He is a cultural anthropologist specializing in environmental and development anthropology. He taught environmental and development anthropology at the department of anthropology of the University of Pretoria for 20 years. He also lectured on communities and conservation at the Centre for Wildlife Management in the period Prof Kobus Bothma was the Director of that Centre.

He has extensive experience in research on the interaction between communities and conservation. His research was focused on communities on the Western border of the Kruger National Park and on the Mozambiquan border of Maputaland in the Kosi Bay area, up into the Futi corridor to just South of Maputo.

Herman has been intricately involved on the civilian side (accredited associations) in the implementation of the Firearms Control Act since its inception in July 2004. First as board member of SA Wingshooters, and later as founder and Executive Chair of the National Shooting Association (NSA), which grew out of SA Wingshooters (NSA changed its name to NHSA on 1 March 2016).

Herman was a founder member of the Hunters Forum and later chairman of the Hunters Forum and of the Hunters / SAPS Consultative Forum for a number of years. He was in 2010 appointed by the then Minister of Police on the committee which investigated the functioning of the CFR (an expensive exercise of which the report was unfortunately never made public and from which very little if anything materialized to better the functioning of the CFR).